There really is no great secret to Steve Fisher’s success. He has become one of the most important sports figures in the history of this city because he was Steve Fisher when he got here and has remained without apology Steve Fisher.

San Diego State’s basketball coach is an impresario who knows how to entertain. He’s in charge of a movement. And he doesn’t take any guff. If you don’t like it, hail a cab.

He is what he is, a program builder, who started here from nothing, zero, below scratch. And he’s turned a university and a community in which students and citizens always had a tin basketball ear into rabid concertgoers.

Somehow, this uncommon common man, who is neither comedian, rock star, maniac, nor a Rex Ryan blowhard, has whetted this city’s appetite for goose bumps, filling its stomach with thrilling, professional goodies.

Steve Fisher is not exciting. What he produces is exciting — nothing perfect, but entertainment with an edge.

Fisher has done what closet and crazed hoopheads once thought impossible. He has turned San Diego into a basketball town. 12,414. Got that number? It’s a sellout at Viejas Arena, which has become an insane asylum. Give him time, and Steve Fisher could sell nicotine patches to Carolina tobacco growers.

The coach who once pushed Michigan to a national title has the most important leadership ingredients in his makeup — he listens, and doesn’t use one side of his mouth when he speaks. His keel is straight, and yet he is a cancer survivor firmly rooted to the extent he can bend without falling. He is part coach, part CEO, part father figure, part priest.

Fisher is a 65-year-old man with arms long enough to reach back a few generations and pull the best out of kids who don’t seem to mind his gray top. Most of his players have succeeded somewhere, sometime. They have egos. They have problems. They come from diverse backgrounds. They are individuals he handles individually.

“I don’t treat them all the same, but I feel I treat them all fairly,” says the coach who has his Aztecs 18-0 and ranked sixth nationally as they take the country’s longest winning streak into New Mexico’s Pit this afternoon.

“I treat them with respect. If you feel you’ve been treated unfairly, you’d better come into my office. I will try to help you be as good as you can be.”

It must be remembered Fisher inherited perhaps the worst program in America in 1999, when the Aztecs would be fortunate to draw 12,414 for an entire season. In the beginning, there wasn’t even a crawl — winless in Mountain West Conference play his first season — then baby steps, then strides, then longer strides that have taken his program national.

“The more time you spend with people, the more you know them, when to yell, when to pat, when to council,” Fisher says. “It’s by choice that you’re here. There are no bars on the windows.